Contact search is important in many scenarios. In this project, we focus on making contact search easy and painless. Specifically, we address two issues: a) Spelling Mistakes b) Multilinguality. Users make different kinds of mistakes while typing names and aliases. It is important that contact search be tolerant to these mistakes. Further, users often type names in one language whereas the name is represented in a different language in the name directory/contact list.

We have developed a hashing-based technology for addressing both spelling mistakes and multilinguality. The key idea is to represent names by hash codes and transform the problem into a similarity search problem involving hash codes.